‘I’m a Teapot’ Error Code Saved From Extinction By Public Outcry

It started back in 1998 as an April Fool’s Day gag. Written up by Larry Masinter of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), error code 418 — “I’m a teapot” — was nothing more than a poke at the “many bad HTTP extensions that had been proposed”. Despite its existence as a joke, a number of major software projects, including Node.js, ASP.NET and Google’s Go language, implemented it as an Easter egg. A recent attempt to excise the fictitious code from these projects ended up doing the opposite, cementing it as a “reserved” error by the IETF… Australian programmer Mark Nottingham flagged the code’s removal as an “issue” for Google’s Go language, the Node.js Javascript runtime and Microsoft’s ASP.NET… Nottingham’s argument was that 418 was “polluting [the] core protocol” of these projects… It didn’t take long for a “Save 418” website to go live and through the efforts of interested internet historians (and jokers), all three of the aforementioned projects have decided to keep the code as it is, though Google will “revisit” the situation with the next major version of Go.

The Save 418 site argued that “the application of such an status code is boundless. Its utility, quite simply, is astonishingly unparalleled. It’s a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans. It’d be a real shame to see 418 go.”